


Kill Sylar

by shamusandstone (theleaveswant)



Category: Heroes - Fandom, Kill Bill (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Movie Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-30
Updated: 2009-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:51:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/shamusandstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First and last scenes of Kill Bill vols. 1 and 2 (respectively) remixed with Heroes reality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kill Sylar

"Do you find me sadistic?"

Click, click, click, the impact of Gabriel's boot heels on the floor of the church as he comes to stand over her prone and paralyzed body. There's blood in her eyes, blood on her tongue, blood soaking the white dress that Angela rolled her eyes at, when she still had eyes to roll. She's not sure how many bones she's broken, bouncing off the walls, the pews, the organ, but her low bet is a half a dozen. Beyond the sound of her own pulse pounding in her ears and her gasping, sobbing breath—she'd hate for anyone to see her this weak, but it hurts and she's scared and she's pretty sure there's nobody else left alive in this building to witness her shame—she's sure she can hear another heartbeat, or feel it, throbbing small and fast and hard. She clings to that sound, that life, wraps all her will around it and fights to stay conscious, stay angry, stay alive.

"You know, I bet I could fry an egg on your head right now, if I wanted to."

He crouches over her and she flinches away from his hand, stays flinched even when she registers gentleness in his touch as he dabs at her cheeks with a monogrammed handkerchief, a jarring contrast with the brutality he displayed not a moment earlier. He's still wearing that damned, dead watch. She tries to gather her energy for one last jolt, hoping against impossibility to take him out long enough to find help.

"I'd like to believe you're aware enough, even now, to know that there's nothing sadistic in my actions." He inclines his out-of-focus head towards the carnage beyond her range of vision. "Maybe towards those other jokers, but not you. No Elle, at this moment, this is me at my most masochistic."

A fingertip trails lovingly, mockingly, over her cheekbone before he stands back up. He raises a hand and she waits for the cutting to start. She tries one more time to talk him down, stall long enough to collect a little more juice.

"Gabriel," she chokes a little around the trickle of blood running from split lips and loose teeth and pooling in the back of her mouth, "it's your bab--"

Two fingers flick, a whip crack. Her head leaves the floor and smashes back down, skull cracking like eggshell, and her vision whites out like sheet lightning.

*

Four years and a lot of corpses later, Elle kisses her sleeping son, reluctantly leaving him to his dreams as she pads silently through the Bennets' old house in search of his father. She finds him waiting in the kitchen, toying with the syringe she'd hidden in her jacket pocket.

"Haitian juice?"

He doesn't make any move to attack her, and she takes advantage of his lenience to get as close as she dares.

"I presume your source was Nathan Petrelli. How is the good senator these days?"

"Well enough, considering."

"I'm surprised he trusted you with this kind of contraband. How did you convince him to share?"

"It was easy. I just dropped your name."

He laughs. "That would do it."

Elle circles, weighing her options. She pauses when Gabriel looks up, locking her gaze.

"Let me guess. You were going to disarm me, take away my abilities, and then what? Chop my head off?"

She inclines her head, assenting in the approximate. He nods.

"I happen to know of a patch of beach not far from here, which I discovered when Hiro Nakamura transported and left me there the last time you and I were together in this house. This patch of beach happens to look particularly beautiful bathed in moonlight, and there happens to be a full moon tonight. So, gunslinger, if you want a gunfight, that's where I'd suggest. But if you want to be old school about it, and you know I appreciate old school, we could wait until dawn and fry each other up at sunrise like a couple of real-life--"

There's a thump as Elle is knocked backward onto the couch, which skids a little with the momentum. Judging him to be caught up in his own monologue, she had balled an energetic projectile in her palm and curled her wrist to throw it, but he'd gestured faster, flinging her and pinning her telekinetically into the furniture.

He growls, stalking into the living room after her. "If you don't settle down I'm going to have to take out one of your kneecaps, and I know from experience that's a very painful bone to have shattered."

He tucks the needle into his shirt pocked and sits on the coffee table opposite her. "Now, when it comes to you, and us, I have a few unanswered questions. So, before this tale of bloody revenge reaches its climax, I'm going to ask you some questions and I want you to tell me the truth. Normally this would present a dilemma, because when it comes to the subject of me I believe you are truly and utterly incapable of telling the truth, especially to me and least of all to yourself." He smiles wryly. "And when it comes to the subject of me, I am truly and utterly incapable of believing anything you say."

"How do you propose to solve this dilemma?" Elle says from the couch, twisting her arms against their invisible bindings.

"It so happens that one of the abilities I picked up, not long after our aforementioned last visit to this house together, was a talent for detecting lies." He tilts his head. "Did you know Sue Landers?"

Elle shakes her head.

"Shame. You might have liked her. She lived the way you wanted to: holding down a day job, hiding her abilities. Passing for normal. Lying about who she was. Like Superman putting on a suit and glasses and calling himself Clark Kent. Like you."

"So there is a point to this."

"You would have worn the costume of a normal person, but you were born special. And every morning when you woke up, you'd still be. Special."

"Are you calling me a super hero?"

"I'm calling you a killer. A natural born killer. You always have been and you always will be. Moving to Manhattan, working in a used record store, going to the movies with Powerless Peter. That's you trying to disguise yourself as a worker bee. But you're not a worker bee, Elle—you never were, even living one-of-us, one-of-them in Primatech's hive. You're a renegade killer bee. And no matter how much peach pie you ate or how fat your ass got, nothing in the world would ever change that."

They stare at each other for a long moment, Gabriel smirking on the coffee table while Elle fumes on the sofa, until he sighs and raises an index finger.

"First question. Did you really think your life in Manhattan was going to work?"

Elle's throat tightens. She wants to lie, to herself more than to him, but what's the point? "No," she blinks back tears, wills him to burn with the heat of her rage, "but I would have had Noah!"

"Don't get me wrong, I think you would have been a wonderful mother." He frowns. "Better than mine anyway, which . . . actually isn't saying that much. And you are a killer. All those people you killed to get to me; felt damn good didn't it?"

"Yes," she breathes, barely louder than a whisper.

"Every single one of them."

She swallows, gathering strength and volume. "Yes."

Gabriel nods. "That was the warm-up round. Now comes the sixty-four thousand dollar question." He leans in. "Why did you hide from me? Hide our baby?"

Elle looks at the floor. "The night after the eclipse, when we came here looking for Claire. After Nakamura dumped you on that beach, he took me to a hospital in New York, I guess because of the bandages. I was bleeding, exhausted, in shock, so I let them treat me. Lied about how I got shot, of course. A couple of weeks later, they were getting ready to discharge me, when Peter showed up with that detective, Parkman. They told me what happened at Pinehearst and at Primatech. What you did. What Nathan was doing. Petrelli tells me to keep my head down, offers to set me up with a place in the city. Keep an eye on me. I smiled politely and told them where to stick it.

"Just as they're putting their coats on to leave a nurse comes in, says she's got some news. She pulls the curtain around the bed, sits down and tells me . . . she told me I was pregnant. I didn't believe her, demanded that they re-do their test, but even before the results came back I knew it was true."

As the words pour out of Elle's body so does the tension, and she sinks, shrinks, into the cushions, hands slack at her sides.

"Before that nurse came to me I was a woman, I was your woman. I was a killer who'd kill for you. Peter insisted that you were gone, dead at the hands of a cheerleader, but I didn't believe him. I was going to limp all the way across the country if I had to, to find you. This even after you tried to leave me when we were powerless, tried to fight Bennet on your own, because I knew you were trying to protect me. But once that test came back, I could no longer do any of those things because I was going to be a mother. Can you understand that?"

"Yes," Gabriel says, moving to sit next to her on the couch. "But why didn't you tell me then instead of now?"

"Once you knew you'd claim him. I didn't want that."

"Not your decision to make." His voice is hard but his touch is soft as he brushes a strand of hair behind her ear and she turns her head to look at him.

"Yes, but it's the right decision and I made it for my son. He deserved to be born with a clean slate, but with you he would have been born into a world he shouldn't have. I had to choose. I chose him." She shivers, finds mobility restored to her limbs, and raises her hands to rub the circulation back into her arms. "You know, five years ago? If I had to make a list of impossible things that could never happen? You performing a coup de grâce on me would have been right at the top of the list. I'd have been wrong, wouldn't I?"

He seems distracted, stroking a hand over her hair, his dark eyes flicking over her body in the pre-dawn glow.

"Well?"

"When you weren't at Pinehearst or at Primatech and nobody I asked before or after I recovered from the fire could tell me where you'd gone, I assumed that whomever Nakamura was working with had killed you. And for the record, letting somebody think that somebody they love is dead when they're not is quite cruel." Elle raises an eyebrow at Gabriel's hypocritical indignation and he continues.

"I mourned you for six months, after Primatech burned, and in the sixth month of mourning you I tracked you down. I wasn't trying to track you down, I was trying to track down the fucking assholes I thought had killed you. So I find you, and what do I find? Not only are you not dead, you're getting married, to Peter Petrelli, who by that point didn't even have any powers that I was aware of, and you're pregnant. I . . . overreacted."

There is a moment of silence while Elle stares at him with her mouth open and her eyebrows halfway up her forehead. "You overreacted? That's your explanation?"

He withdraws his hand from her hair and looks away. "I didn't say I was going to explain myself. I'm a killer. I'm a monster, you know that, and there are consequences to breaking the heart of a monster. You experienced some of them." He glances back. "Was my reaction really that surprising?"

"Yes, it was. Could you do what you did? Of course you could. But I never thought you would or could do that to me."

"I'm truly sorry, Elle. You thought wrong."

Elle cracks her knuckles and curls her fingers towards her palms. Blue light flares and flickers between them. "You and I have unfinished business."

Gabriel's eyes narrow but his mouth quirks up at the corner. "Baby, you ain't kidding."

The fight is over before it even begins; as Gabriel deflects the lightning she's gathered in her right hand her left comes up, clutching the second syringe, tucked into her sleeve all along, and plunges it into his neck. The spark in his hand dies and the burns on his arm do not sew shut.

He gasps, looking as awed as he did the first time the sparks danced between his fingers that day at Pinehearst, the first time his eyes met hers when she snapped the rope in his shop in New York. There are tears in his eyes again, like their were on those days, as there are in hers.

Gabriel laughs softly. "I suppose I should have anticipated that."

Elle smiles at him. She hasn't killed him yet, maybe she doesn't have to. Maybe they can still work this out . . . but no. Not anymore. It was too late before it ever started, and it's definitely too late now after all the people they've each put in the ground trying to tear each other apart.

Gabriel knows it too; he isn't begging, isn't arguing. He leans in to kiss her once, calmly, tenderly, then stands to face her. He straightens his sleeves and holds his arms out from his body a little. "How do I look?"

Elle stands up too, moves her hands to wipe the tears from her cheeks, then changes her mind and lets them flow. "Ready," she says.

Elle extends her open palms towards him, keeping her eyes on his as she opens the floodgates, allowing the charge to pour through her body into his. He doesn't scream as she vaporizes him, washing away the life she forced them both into six years ago when she saved him from the rope. It doesn't begin to heal the damage they've each done since that day, but it may cauterize the wound.

Then she goes upstairs, wraps up her son in her arms, and carries him out of the house.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fusion--basically takes scenes from Kill Bill and rewrites them with characters and story elements from Heroes. Much of the action and dialogue is adapted or borrowed wholesale from Kill Bill. Spoilers for both volumes of KB (uses first scene of vol. 1 and end of vol. 2) and through volume 3 of Heroes. Written for a prompt at the [movie-inspired fic meme](http://superkappa.livejournal.com/817078.html).


End file.
